EXCELLENT WOMEN:
THE NOVELS OF BARBARA PYM AND ANITA BROOKNER
Elizabeth Susanna van Aswegen B.A. (Bib!.), M.A.
A thesis accepted by the Faculty of Arts,
Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Boer Onderwys, in fulfilment or the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR LITTERARUM
Promoter: Prof. Annette L. Combrink, M.A., D.Litt., U.E.D.
POTCHEFSTROOM April 198'l
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I .wish to thank:
my promoter, Professor Combrink, for her painstaking and valued guidance, as well as for her help and encouragement to this long-distance writer;
the staff of the Ferdinand Postma Library and the Cape Technikon Library for their assistance;
Cathy Coetzee and Brenda Bodde for their encouragement;
Jenny Zinn for her impeccable typing;
my daughter, Lisa, who faced the ordeal of a scrivening mother with patience and good nature.
TABLE OF CONTimTS
2
INTRODUCTION
A SURVEY OF CRITICISM: BARBARA PYM 2.1 Introduction
2.2 The early novels
2.3 The early published novels 2.4 Critical acclaim
2.5 "The novelist most touted by one's most literate friends" 2.6 Criticism: 1977 to date
2.6.1 Some Tame Gazelle 2.6.2 Excellent Women 2.6.3 Jane and Prudence 2.6.4 Less than Angels 2.6.5 A Class of Blessings 2.6.6 No Fond Return of Love 2.6. 7 An Unsuitable Attachment 2.6.8 Quartet in Autumn 2.6.9 The Sweet Dove Died 2.6.10 A Few Green Leaves 2.6.11 Crampton Hodnet 2.6.12 An Academic Question 2. 7 The critical consensus
2. 7.1 2.7.2 2. 7.3
The scope of the critical oeuvre Barbara Pym's themes
Barbara Pym's characters
iii 11 13 14 16 20 23 26 27 29 37 40 43 48 54 61 63 68 73 79 81 81 82 82
iv 3 4 2. 7.4 2.7.5 2. 7.6 2. 7. 7
Barbara Pym's style Barbara Pym and literature
Comparisons with Jane Austen and other novelists Barbara Pym's stature as a novelist
A SURVEY OF CRITICISM: ANITA BROOKNER 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Criticism to date 3.2.1 A Start in Life 3.2.2 Providence 3.2.3 Look at Me 3.2.4 Hotel duLac 3.2.5 Family and Friends 3.2.6 A Misalliance 3.3 The critical consensus
3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.3.4 3.3.5 3.3.6 3.3.7
The scope of the critical oeuvre Anita Brookner's themes Anita Brookner's characters Anita Brookner's style
Comparisons with other novelists Comparisons with Barbara Pym Anita Brookner's stature as a novelist
SOMETHING TO LOVE 4.1 Introduction
4.2 Love in its various guises 4.3 Some Tame Gazelle 4.4 Crampton Hodnet 83 85 85 86 89 91 96 96 100 108 114 121 129 132 133 133 135 135 137 137 138 141 143 144 146 156
v
4.5 Excellent Women 169
4.6 Jane and Prudence 181
4.7 Less than Angels 194
4.8 A Glass of Blessings 205
4.9 No Fond Return of Love 217
4.10 An Unsuitable Attachment 232
4.1] Quartet in Autumn 252
4.12 The Sweet Dove Died 274
4.13 A Few Green Leaves 293
4.14 An Academic Question 303
4.15 Conclusion 308
5 A WORLD NOT WON BY VIRTUE 313
5.1 A Start in Life 315
5.2 Providence 336
5.3 Look at Me 356
5.4 Hotel du Lac
378 5.5 Family and Friends
394
5.6 A Misalliance 404
5. 7 Conclusion 418
6 ANGLICANS, ACADEMICS AND ACCOUTREMENTS:
AN EXAMINATION OF CHARACTER 425
6.1 Introduction
427
6.2 The characters 429
6.2.1 Clergymen 430
6.2.2 Academics and librarians 439
6.2.3 Cleaning women 448
6.3 Food
vi
6.4 Clothes 481
6.5 Interiors 490
6.6 The "revivalist impulse" 495
7 MANNERS TO MELANCHOLY:
SOME ASPECTS OF STYLE 501
8 CONCLUSION AND EVALUATION 529
9 ABSTRACT 537
EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
"A thesis must be long. The object, you see, is to bore and stupefy the examiners to such an extent that they will have to accept it -only if a thesis is short enough to be read all the way through word for word is there any danger of failure."
Barbara Pym: Less than Angels
Professor Mainwaring had taught his students always to make carbon copies, use inverted commas round certain technical terms and, best of all, that thanks can never be too fulsome.
2 EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
INTRODUCTION
3
-~---From 1950, until her death in 1980, Barbara Pym published ten novels. The social climate of the 'sixties and early 'seventies was not receptive to her subtle literary style, and her writing suffered a devastating publishing eclipse of 16 years. Her diary, published posthumously in 1984, contains a poignal'!t entry early in 1963:
"24 March 1963. To receive a bitter blow on an early Spring evening (such as that Cape don't want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment - but it might be that someone doesn't love you any more) - is it worse than on an Autumn or Winter evening? Smell of bonfire (the burning of rose prunings etc), a last hyacinth in the house, forsythia about to burst, a black and white cat on the sofa, a small fire burning in the grate, books and Sunday papers and the re-mains of tea" (Pym, 1984d:215).
That same year saw the publication of the Bishop of Woolwich's controversial Honest to God, while Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer sold 60,000 copies on the first day of publication. This was therefore hardly a compatible publishing climate for Barbara Pym's infinitely milder comedies of manners.
Barbara Pym had been corresponding with Philip Larkin since 1961, when he had Intended to review her next novel (the ill-fated An Unsuitable Attachment, rejected by Cape). A renaissance in her fortunes came in January 1977, when the Times Literary Supplement asked a selection of critics to say which writers they considered to be the most underrated of the past 75 years. Only one author was mentioned twice; both Pym's mentor, the poet Philip Larkin, and
4
- - - -- -··- ···
-"XCELLENT WOMEN Intr-oduction
Lord David Cecil, writer and critic, and formerly Goldsmith Professor of English Literature at Oxford, chose Pym as one of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century. Although Pym had never stopped writing during her arid publishing years, this critical acclaim stimulated renewed interest in her work, and in 1977 Quartet in Autumn was short-listed for Britain's most _prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.
Lord David Cecil commented that Barbara Pym's "unpretentious, subtle, accom-plished novels . . . are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past 75 years", 1 while Philip Larkin noted:
"Their narratives • • . (are] • •. recounted by a protagonist who tempers an ironic perception of life's absurdities with a keen awareness of its ability to bruise •.• What stays longest with the reader, once the amusement, the satire, the alert ear and the exact eye have all been acknowledged? Partly it is the underlying loneliness of life, the sense of vulnerant omnes, whatever one thinks of when turning out the light in bed . . . (Her books] are miniatures, perhaps, but will not diminish" (Larkin, 1977:260).
Barbara Pym's comic touch has been compared with that of Jane Austen; like Austen she is a miniaturist and gentle satirist; as well as dealing with the limited English world of parish jumble sales, garden fetes, lectures at learned societies and decorous dinner parties (Jane Austen's "small, square two inches of ivory"), she uses the twin techniques of wit and irony, and with acerbic penetration, warmth and gentle humour, reveals the ordinariness and
EXCELLENT WOMEN
Introduction 5
eccentricities of daily life and the human frailties inheren.t in the lives of ordinary people.
In her characterisation, too, she is reminiscent of Jane Austen, or "Jane Austen let loose in Cranford" as Jilly Cooper has described her novels. But her characterisation goes deeper than humorous depictions of comic clergymen and pothering anthropologists; in A Glass of Blessings, for example, which Larkin has designated "the subtlest of her books" (1977:260), the heroine, Wilmet Forsyth, is reminiscent of Jane Austen's Emma. This novel, like Emma, is a story of self-deception, and the problem of the heroine is to undeceive herself. Edgar Johnson's comments on Jane Austen (Johnson, 1945:388) could largely be applied to Pym's gently ironic portraiture of the human condition:
"She watched with an interest almost entirely spectatorial. Her tendency is toward a mild and sympathetic amusement deepening at times to intellectual scorn and disapprobation. Towards her audience her attitude is the assumption that it consists of people like herself; that they will enjoy the spectacle of life and the revelation of folly, and enjoy it all the more if their absurdities are no more than hinted at by a subtle and completely conscious intelligence. She and they will be equals smiling at a delicately delightful comedy. With just a dash of enjoyable acerbity, sanity of vision and witty insight are offered for their own sakes, and observation of the social scene becomes its own sufficient reward. Observation itself thus grows into critical observation, judgement into critical judgement."
Anita Brookner published her first novel, A Start in
Life,
in 1981, and has published a critically acclaimed novel every year since then. In 1984 she won6 RXCRLLI!NT WOMEN lntroducti()n
the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac. With the publication of her second novel, Providence, reviewers mooted tentative parallels with the work of Barbara Pym. She has been compared by reviewers to writers as diverse as the Brontes and Henry James; however, her novels also approach those of Jane Austen in acute portraiture, dialogue and succinct authorial comment. Polished, subtle and supremely ironic in style, her view of life is also infinitely bleaker than that of Barbara Pym, with the latter's "virtue of enduring . . . , the unpretentious adherence to the Church or England, the absence of self-pity, the scrupulous-ness of one's relations with others, the small blameless comforts" (Larkin, 1977:260). Brookner's thesis is essentially the fable of the hare and the tor-toise. The heroine of Hotel du Lac, a writer of light romantic fiction, explains:
'People love [that story), especially women. Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically • . . Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth . . . ' (Brookner, 1985b:27 -28).
Like that of Jane Austen, her portraiture of minor characters is mercilessly acute, brittle and funny. She goes further than Pym in painting an unsettling picture of the "loneliness of the long-distance runner", the achiever who, despite academic and professional excellence, is unsuccessful at social and personal relationships.
EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
7
The title of this thesis, "Excellent Women", is derived from the title of Barbara Pym's second published novel; the charismatic and languid clergymen, the hapless anthropologists in need of a woman's care (or more pragmatically, a competent indexer or proof-reader of their scholarly tomes), thus depicting the centra I characters of her nove is:
"Excellent women whom one respects and esteems".
In Brookner's novels the "excellent women" are the tortoises, the losers who risk all but gain nothing in the game of love. Pym's "excellent women" are rather undistinguished hares, some of whom are committed to future husbands by the end of the novels, others who prefer to cherish pale curates or bleakly opt for selfish and lonely lives.
Similarities and correspondences between these two writers have been noted by critics and reviewers en passant only; for example the American novelist Anne Tyler, having claimed Barbara Pym as a favourite writer in a New York Times poll in December 1982 (Shapiro, 1983:29), has made the most pertinent and lengthy comparison. In her review of Hotel du Lac (Tyler, 1985:1) she notes:
"In fact, Anita Brookner has . . . been compared with Pym - less because of style, one supposes, than because of her cast of players. Her central character is invariably a mild-mannered English spinster, pleasant to look at, if not very striking, and impeccably dressed. She is so correct, so self-controlled and punctilious, that we are surprised to learn how young she is - not yet out of her 30's. Not too old to look up in a quick, alert, veiled way whenever an unattached man wanders past.
8 EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
"But what she sees when she looks at the man - well, till now, that's where she differed from most of the women in Pym's books. Pym's heroine would generally see someone appealing but comically flawed (as all men are, she would reflect with a smile). Miss Brookner's always saw a rescuer. Pym's heroine would be rueful, self-mocking. Miss Brookner's was seriously hopeful, and seriously cast down when her hopes failed to materialize."
Exhaustive research has revealed two very recent dissertations 1 on the novels of Barbara Pym, with the first monographic appraisals of her work appearing as late as 1986.2 There has been no full-length appraisal of the work of Anita Brookner, and no comparison of the novels of Pym and Brookner, other than passing comments in book reviews, has appeared, largely, it is supposed, owing to the recent emergence (and prolific output) of Brookner as a novelist of stature.
The posthumous appearance of Barbara Pym's autobiography in 1984 in the form of her edited diaries, as well as the publication of two previously unpublished novels (Crampton Hodnet and An Academic Question) in 1985 and 1986 respec-tively, yields further topical and uncharted scholastic territory, while the paucity of substantial criticism on these authors (literature searches have yielded mostly book reviews) further supports the feasibility of this study. In addition, Barbara Pym's canonisation after her renaissance in 1977, as well as the critical acclaim accorded Anita Brookner in her rapid ascent to the stature
Fisichelli (1984) and Heberlein (1984). 2 Benet (1986) and Long (1986).
EXCELLENT WOMEN
Introduction 9
of a cult novelist, 1 would appear to make a detailed comparison both timely and topical.
Given the interesting publishing history of both writers, this thesis will there-fore undertake a full account of the critical consensus regarding the novels, extricated from the plethora of book reviews, an in-depth comparative analysis of the themes of eighteen novels, an examination of both protagonists and peripheral characters in the novels, as well as a consideration of the writers as participants in the established tradition of "high comedy" and the novel of manners, which will include an analysis of their wit and irony. As both writers make extensive use of literary allusions and analogies in the fabric of their writing, this aspect will form a substantial element in the analysis of themes and style. A tentative hypothesis is that Anita Brookner has appropriated the novel of manners of Jane Austen and Henry James as a vehicle for more melan-choly reflections. Whereas Pym's novels are rueful but eomie reflections of life's slings and arrows, Brookner's works are more acute psychological percep-tions, melancholic musings on "what behaviour most becomes a woman". This thesis will therefore critically assess both Pym and Brookner as "modern miniaturists" of the twentieth century.
Brookner made a personal appearance at New York's Three Lives Bookstore early in 1985, from which fans had to be turned away (Barbato, 1985:31).
10 EXCELLENT WOMEN Introduction
EXCELLENT WOMEN 11 A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
CHAPTER TWO
The position of the unmarried woman - unless, of course, she is somebody's mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the readers of modern fiction.
Barbara Pym: A Very Private Eye
I really still wonder if my books will ever be acceptable again when I read the reviews in the Sundays. I think It might be nice to be famous and sought after when one is rather old and ga-ga - not in one's forties and fifties, or perhaps fame when you're very young is good, if the years after aren't too much of a let-down.
Barbara Pym: A Very Private Eye
Tea with Lord David Cecil • • . He said that Anthony Powell and I were the only novelists he would buy without reading first.
12 EXCELLENT WOMEN 'A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
EXCELLENT WOMEN
A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 13
2 A SURVEY OF CRITICISM: BARBARA PYM
2.1 Introduction
No attempt at an evaluation of the current critical acclaim enjoyed by the novels of Barbara Pym is possible without examining the lacuna of 1963 - 1977. Her early work enjoyed a modest but devoted following. The invidious situation of the unpublished novelist, and the effects of this enforced hiatus on Pym's writing, are best described by her literary executor and eo-editor of the posthumous diaries, Hazel Holt:
"The effect of the so-called Swinging Sixties made Barbara's novels seem unacceptable, especially to a publishing house like Cape which was beginning to specialise in what were then called 'contemporary' novels and whose list, as Barbara wryly remarked, consisted mainly of 'men and Americans'. In 1963 they rejected her novel An Unsuitable Attachment. 'Of course,' she wrote to Philip Larkin, 'it may be that this book Is much worse than my others, though they didn't say so.' She would have been, as she always had been, willing to make any revisions her publisher thought necessary, but no one made any such suggestions.
"The unexpectedness and finality of this blow (since in that particular literary climate no other publisher would take it) severely damaged her self-confidence. She felt that it was her failure as a writer that was the reason for the rejee -tion rather than that the times were unpropitious for her kind of novel, and for a while she mistrusted her own talents as well as her critical judgement" (Pym, 1984d:213).
14 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
- - - -
-
-In this study only two reviews have been traced prior to 1977, the year of Pym's resurrection as a cult novelist. The only recourse has been to the aforementioned diaries, published posthumously in 1984 as A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym, which yield snippets of information with regard to Pym's early literary prognosis.
The entry for 4 September 1933, while Barbara was an undergraduate at Oxford, foreshadows Crampton Hodnet (published posthumously in 1985): "Reading Gertrude Trevelyan's novel Hothouse. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel - but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well" (Pym, 1984d:25). Perhaps Crampton Hodnet could be regarded as an early prototype of the "campus novel"; debatable though this may be, we have in this entry some evidence of a critical faculty at work, the notion of "emotion recollected in tranquillity". Apparent spontaneity, therefore, is the result of a process of reflection and revision, and the neoclassic characteristics of wit and decorum, rather than romantic excess, are intrinsic to Pym's writing.
2.2 'l'he early novels
Barbara Pym's first published novel was Some Tame Gazelle, and the diary entry for
i
September 1934 reads as follows: "Sometime in July I began writing a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish • • . So I am going on with it and one day it may become a book" (Pym, 1984d:44). However, dejection was to set in soon; at the end of 1935 Pym writes: "Today I had two stories rejected by the London Mercury, so that only need my novel back from Gollancz to complete everything . I want Liebe but I would be satisfied ifEXCELLENT WOMEN
A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 15
my novel could be published", and on 2 January 1936 she notes glumly: "My novel came back from Gollancz with a polite note" (Pym, 1984d:55-56). At last, in August 1936, a more cheerful and propitious entry reads: "Last Monday I had a letter from Jonathan Cape - saying that he was interested in my novel Some Tame Gazelle and thought he might be able to offer to publish it if I would make some alterations. They are quite minor ones . • . " (Pym, 1984d:60), and a few days later, in a letter to Henry Harvey, an Oxford flame, and the prototype of Archdeacon Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle, she writes: "I am greatly cheered by this, but only vaguely hopeful. Why should Jonathan Cape want to publish my novel, when Macmillan and Methuen didn't? (I don't count Chatto and Gollancz as nobody but a fool would have published it in its early form.) And anyway, I'm only twenty-three. But all the same I shall probably cry if Cape don't take it" (Pym, 1984d:60).
The war intervened, and publication of Some Tame Gazelle was shelved. However, in 1938 a number of drafts of unpublished novels emerged. In a letter to Jock (Robert Liddell, an old Oxford friend) she wrote in 1940:
"You are so nice wishing good things for my poor novels. I do not see much prospect of getting them published just now, though I believe they are the kind of novels some people might like to read at a time like this . . • am now getting into shape the novel l have been writing during this last year, and which I have had to lay aside because I have been so busy [provisionally entitled Crampton Hodnet). It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did l have also done nearly half of a novel about the war. There is a nice vicar's wife called Jane, her daughter Flora • . • And there is always my poor Tame Gazelle" (Pym, 1984d:100).
16 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
More despondency followed in 1942: "I have written a story called 'Goodbye, Balkan Capital' which I have sent to Penguin New Writing, but three weeks have passed and I have heard nothing. Shall 1 ever succeed - I begin to doubt it sometimes and now is a hopeless time to try" (Pym, 1984d:l 06).
2.3 The early published novels
In 1946, after the war, and subsequent to her discharge from the W RNS, Pym joined the International African Institute as Assistant Editor of the journal Africa. Her colleague at the Institute, and life-long friend, Hazel Holt, points out that the anthropologists, linguists and librarians she encountered there furnished profuse comic potential for her novels:
"She created a comic world around them, embroidering the few facts she knew about the various authors and reviewers into a splendid fantasy so that it was often difficult to remember what was real and what was not. ('I couldn't ask W. if his mother was better because I couldn't remember if we'd invented her.') She was quick to pick out the ridiculous phrase (anthropological and, especially, linguistic studies are very rich in these) thereby making what would have been a tedious task of proof-reading or editing a constant delight to those who worked with her" (Pym, 1984d:l83).
The diary entries for 1946-1948 are few and slight. Changed circumstances (the nursing and death of her mother), a new life and career in London, and the revision of Some Tame Gazelle left little time for personal confidences.
EXCELLENT WOMEN 17 A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
In November 1949, she noted that Cape's readers, Daniel George and William Plomer, were both in agreement over Some Tame Gazelle, and in May 1950, was able to write to her old friend Henry Harv.ey in Gottingen: "Here is my book published today - with the author's compliments. don't know if it will amuse you but hope that perhaps it may" (Pym, l984d:187).
As noted previously, reviews of Pym's early novels are scant. Hazel Holt, however, notes in her introduction to the diaries of 1948 to 1963 that Some Tame Gazelle enjoyed "a general critical success":
"'Delightfully amusing,' wrote one critic in The Guardian, 'but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell"' (Pym, 1984d:184).
Excellent Women, generally regarded as the most popular of her novels and archetypal of her genre, was published in 1952, was a Book Society Choice, and was subsequently seriallsed in the BBC's Woman's Hour. Jane and Prudence (1953), Less than Angels (1955), A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return of Love (1961) followed. According to Holt, they were "praised by the critics, enjoyed a modest financial success and delighted an ever-growing circle of admirers and enthusiasts" (Pym, 1984d:l84).
However, we learn from a letter that "[Jock] liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don't and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 lsic] Americans and 10 [sic] Continental publishers saw and 'declined' (that seems to
18 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs" (Pym, 1984d:l91).
In an early review in the Times Literary Supplement of 1953, a scant 16 lines are devoted to Jane and Prudence, with the anonymous reviewer somewhat damning the novel with faint praise:
"Some incidents occur; they are not easy to recall after one has closed the book. A former Oxford don, Jane is highly literate, as indeed her creator evidently is. For Miss Pym writes well, and this chronicle of her heroine's doings Is really very small beer indeed to have come from a brewery in which Oxford, a taste for Jane' Austen, and an observant eye have all played their parts" (Anon., 1953:625).
This oblique reference to Jane Austen - it is not clear whether the reviewer is referring to the heroine's adoption of the literary role model of Emma Woodhouse, or whether he is comparing Pym's talents to Austen's - was to be
the first of many comparisons between Barbara Pym and Jane Austen.
A Glass of Blessings was published on 14 April 1958. A disgruntled entry in the
diary reads: "Only 3 [sic] reviews up to 29 April, none wholly good. My humour deserts me when I am dealing with romance, I am tone-deaf to dialogue, am moderately amusing. Reviewers all women. Young·?" (Pym, J984d:199).
The publication in 1961 of No Fond Return of Love led to a life-long correspondence with the poet Philip Larkin, later responsible for Pym's literary renaissance. In her first letter to Larkin she wrote:
EXCELLENT WOMEN 19 A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
"Thank you very much for your letter. I was very pleased and flattered to think that you should have had the idea of writing an essay on my books and am grateful to you for telling me about it, even though it was too late to do it. Perhaps, if you still feel like doing it, I could let you know when my next is ready - (so far only four chapters written). It will be my seventh which seems a significant number.
"N.F.R.L. [sic] • • . has had a better reception than I thought it would have, and your letter certainly encourages me to go on" (Pym, 1984d:201).
Subsequent letters to Philip Larkin indicate that no substantial criticism of the novels had appeared. In a reply to his enquiry she wrote:
"No - nobody has ever written about the 'art' of my books - sometimes they have been well reviewed - other times not at ail. Excellent Women was best received - A Glass of Blessings worst!" (Pym, 1984d:204). Larkin was sub-sequently to designate A Glass of Blessings as the subtlest of her novels.
To a friend Bob (Robert Smith, who was later to write the first piece of substantial Pym criticism), she complained of not selling sufficient copies of No Fond Return of Love (1962) to warrant publication in paperback: "How nice of you to want my new novel - a few people do, I think, though not really enough" (Pym, 1984d:207). Late in 1962 she received an auspicious letter from Lady David Cecil, wife of another subsequent mentor, complimenting her on No Fond Return of Love.
20
---~---·--·
EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
The ill-fated An Unsuitable Attachment was despatcned to Cape early in 1963. Pym's letter to Larkin is premonitory:
"I sent my novel to Cape last week but don't know yet what they think of it. I feel it can hardly come up to Catch 22 or The Passion Flower Hotel for selling qualities but I hope they will realise that it is necessary for a good publisher's list to have something milder" (Pym, 1984d:21 0).
The response of the publishers to the novel has already been noted. In 1968 Pym completed The Sweet Dove Died; in spite of its more risque theme it was rejected by various publishers. "Not the kind of novel", wrote one, "to which people are turning" (Pym, 1984d:213). ,
2.4 Critical acclaim
In October 1971 Robert Smith published the first substantial critical appreciation of her work. In an article with the rather twee title "How Pleas-ant to Know Miss Pym", he demonstrated that Pym novels were something more than simply "books for bad days" (1971:67).
Her mundus muliebris, the detailed observation of the minutiae of middle-class daily life honed by the needle of wit, constitutes the Pym novel. Although the world she depicts is a closed one - "unsuspected by those who do not penetrate the mysteries of Bloomsbury or the Inns of Court" (Smith, 1971:64)- the themes are universal:
EXCELLENT WOMEN 21 A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
"· •• love thwarted or satisfied (even fashionable homosexuality is here, just under the surface in one of the books); worldly ambition, nearly always academic ambition, and the complications which ensue; the challenge of the daily routine - and Miss Pym was first in the field in the pre-occupation with the kitchen sink, over which her female characters so often come into their own" (Smith, 1971:64).
Her delineation of character, too, is exact. Pym's most notable creation is that of a new kind of heroine, the "excellent women" who people most of her novels, and whose dreariness is mitigated by wit. Female characters are foils to the caricatured race of men, "bearably selfish, charmingly abstracted, unconsciously demanding, always calling for, and usually receiving from some woman somewhere, devotion and service" (Smith, 1971:65).
The form and style of the novels conform to classical proportions and are "well-bred": some 70,000 words in length, twenty to twenty-five chapters. 1 An arresting phrase or idea is reserved for the beginning and end of each (Smith, 1971:66). This puts one in mind of Jane Austen once more, and Smith does in fact comment on the resemblance:
II .• when an assessment of Miss Pym is to be embarked upon, a greater name
is usually invoked (sometimes apologetically, but apparently irresistibly) - that of Jane Austen. Can Miss Pym be claimed as the Jane Austen of our times? In some ways, of course, this seems presumptuous, but in other ways it is too modest since, though her canvas is small, her range and scope are considerably
Pym therefore appears to strive for eighteenth-century "correctness", and is sedulous in her observation of the demands of stylistic decorum.
22 EXCgLLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
wider than those of Jane Austen . • . Her works are miniatures, exquisitely, nearly perfectly, done. But beyond this, it is her wit and her sense of the ridiculous which make her books both delicious and distinguished. Above all, they must be ranked as comic novels, but the comedy is realistic and demon-strates again and again the happiness and merriment which can be found in the trivia of the dally round - that 'purchase of a sponge-cake' about which Jane Austen felt it proper to write to Cassandra" (Smith, 1971:63-68).
Barbara Pym's attempts to publish An Unsuitable Attachment proved fruitless; publisher after publisher rejected it. Despite the general gloom engendered by countless rejection slips, Pym's wit is still apparent in this letter to Philip Larkin:
"Since I last wrote I have sent my book to Longmans, where I had an introduction, but they have decided not to publish it, and say what one had suspected, that 'novels like An Unsuitable Attachment, despite their qualities,
are getti~g increasingly difficult to sell', though they did say it was 'most
excellently written'. And of course the more one looks at the books now being published, not to mention the stirring events of this year [the Profumo scandal], the less likely it seems that anyone, except a very select few, would want to read a novel by me. I could almost offer my services to Dr Stephen Ward as a ghost writer, for he is a Canon's son and surely I could write about his early years if not the later ones" (Pym, 1984d:217).
In 1964 she thanked Philip Larkin for having spoken of her to John Betjeman (a kind reviewer). Larkin had admitted in a previous letter to liking Faustina, the cat in An Unsuitable Attachment. By that time she had made a start on the
EXCELLENT WOMEN
A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 23
autobiographical The Sweet Dove Died. The BBC serialised No Fond Return of Love in October 1966, which prompted her to make the dreary round of publishers with An Unsuitable Attachment once more. The publishing houses to which she had submitted The Sweet Dove Died returned the manuscript of An Unsuitable Attachment with letters of regret, contending that its publication was a risky commercial venture.
Jonathan Cape negotiated limited library editions of her published novels with Chivers of Bath, and this of-fered some small consolation -"the name of Barbara Pym not totally sunk in oblivion" (Pym, 1984d:235). She was briefly encouraged by the publishing house of Peter Davis, who, though not willing to publish The Sweet Dove Died, called it "very accomplished", a "minor tour de force" (Pym, 1984d:259). Less kind comments were "decadent", "clever-clever", and "obsessed with trivia" (Pym, 1984d:259-260).
2.5 "The novelist most touted by one's most literate friends"
In January 1977 the Times Literary Supplement published a list, selected by eminent literary figures, of the most underrated writers of the century. Barbara Pym was the only living author to be named by two people, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil. "Partly because of the publicity, partly because the literary climate had gradually changed and partly because there had always been a strong band of faithful readers, her books were, virtually overnight, in demand again" (Pym, 1984d:291).
24 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
The diary entries from 1977 until her death from cancer in 1980 clearly reveal Pym's meteoric rise from relative obscurity to a novelist of cult proportions. Macmillan published Quartet in Autumn (1977), and The Sweet Dove Died (1978). A Few Green Leaves and the ill-starred An Unsuitable Attachment were published posthumously, as were the early Crampton Hodnet and Pym's misguided attempt at trendiness, An Academic Question. It was with considerable gratifi-cation that Pym could report: 111 am being taught ••. in an American
univer-sity!" (Pym, 1984d:291).
The euphoria is apparent from a scan of the diaries and letters of 1977 until her death. Despite this sudden limelight, her quirky sense of humour did not desert her, as may be seen from the following letter to Larkin: "Caroline Moorehead from The Times has asked if she can come and see me. Hilary says we must clean the windows! Do you have a window cleaner in Hull?" (Pym, 1984d:297). Her sense of "the trivial round, the common task" never deserted her.
She met Lord David Cecil on 19 May 1977; an indication of his estimation is discerned in the diary entry for that day: "He told me he had been inspired to write after reading Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians Uust as I had been inspired by Crome Yellow). He said that Anthony Powell and I were the only novelists he would buy without reading first" (Pym, 1984d:3 00).
The reviews of Quartet in Autumn were by and large favourable. The day after publication she wrote to Philip Larkin: "I had a marvellous day - lovely weather and plenty of drink and even a telegram from James Wright in Macmillan. And of course the day before, articles in Times and Guardian by
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 25
those clever young women. Caroline Moorehead told me how hard it was to find writers to write about these days so perhaps I have been a godsend to somebody! Actually the Guardian article is even better, I think. And surely those photographs show that slightly mad jolly fun face? .•• Two good reviews so far" (Pym, 1984d:305).
In a letter to her earliest critic, Robert Smith, she wrote:
"Things go well, still, with more good reviews of Quartet. The only less favourable ones have been in the Sunday Telegraph - not bad but the woman obviously didn't like BP type novels - and the New Statesman - again not bad, but the reviewer thought my novels must have had mainly Oxbridge readers ••• TLS has been very favourable, also (surprisingly) Financial Times. And a very nice thing - I had a letter from the Editor of the Church Times saying that although they didn't now normally have space for novel reviews he was going to review mine In November ••• if only because I had given so many splendid free commercials for the Church Times" (Pym, 1984d:307).
It might be pointed out here that Quartet in Autumn was a departure in theme and mood from her previous novels - a move that was not appreciated by all Pym aficionados. About the reception of The Sweet Dove Died she was doubtful - "I expect people will find the SD totally different from Quartet and I daresay it will not be liked, but you can't win, really, because quite a lot of people don't like Quartet at all because it isn't light and funny like some of my earlier ones" (Pym, 1984d:313). Despite this pessimism the new novel was "gratifyingly well received" and reached third place in the Sunday Times list of best sellers.
26 P.XCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Uarbara Pym
To her surprise and gratification, Pym was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in October 1978. Early in 1978 Penguin issued her early novels in paperback. By now the Americans had acquired a taste for Pym, and her novels were published by Dutton in the United States. Despite "super American
reviews for E.W. and Quartet in Autumn, including a long one in the New
Yorker from John Updike" (Pym, 1984d:324), she was assailed by doubts: "I daresay the Americans won't like that book [The Sweet Dove Diedl, perhaps Leonora could only be credible in England?" (Pym, 1984d:324). She was invited to lecture in the United States in 1979, but by that time was too ill to accept. However, one of her last entries in the diary retains the droll perception which characterises her novels:
"As I am not feeling well at the moment . . . I find myself reflecting on the mystery of life and death and the way we all pass through this world in a kind of procession. The whole business as inexplicable and mysterious as the John Le Carre serial, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which we are all finding so baffling" (Pym, 1984d:331).
2.6 Criticism: 1977 to date
Given Pym's fallow years, and the circumstances of her re-entry into the literary world, a mere chronological survey of the very substantial number of reviews of Barbara Pym's novels after her canonisation in 1977 is unlikely to be as fruitful as examining the reviews and criticism of each novel in her con-siderable oeuvre. It should be borne in mind that Pym's novels were published in America only after 1977, a considerable period after the appearance of the
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 27
early novels in Britain. This study therefore undertakes to survey the critical field with regard to each novel.
2.6.1 Some Tame Gazelle
Michael Gorra (1983:18), in a review entitled "Restraint is the Point", comments on the complete control of the novel: "Some Tame Gazelle is a completely con-trolled and realized consideration, of the themes to ·Which this unusually cons is-tent writer returned in her nine succeeding novels • . . This novel has all the quiet skill, the tough, reasonable wit and, above all, the calm integrity of Barbara Pym's best work."
She shares with Jane Austen the theme of self-recognition and self-knowledge, thereby nullifying any possible accusations of complacency. "Compression" and "delicacy" are key characteristics of Pym's style, and momentous realisations are deftly woven into the seemingly uneventful surface of the narrative.
Michiko Kakutani calls this novel "lovely" and "muted" (1983a). Like Gorra, he notes that the style is assured and does not read like an apprentice work. "The author's voice is already steady and quietly assured, deft in its manipula-tion of irony and social detail. And the themes that would animate the author's later work - the perils of love and the tendency of 'excellent women' to form 'unsuitable attachments' - are also delineated in full" (Kakutani, 1983a:l9).
28 gxcELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
Rakutani selects a musical metaphor and is loath to abandon it: "Though modest in scale and ambition, the novels are all perfectly tuned in timbre and pitch, and like a fine harpsichord, afford the reader delicate plet~sures that resonate insidiously in the mind" (1983a:l9).
The emotional restraint of the novel is a merciful relief from the "noisy
passions and hectic demands of self-fulfillment" of the characters of contem
-porary fiction. Other adjectives which characterise the novel are "palpable" and "real", "tidy" and "class-conscious", and it is ultimately a novel of propriety and good taste. From Kakutani's appraisal it would appear that neoclassic notions of decorum (viz. "propriety" and "good taste") are the hallmarks of Pym's narra
-tive style.
The remaining reviews are brief. Publishers Weekly calls Pym's earlier work "subtly witty", and feels that Pym fans will find this "diverting tale" only mildly amusing. Clerics and "excellent women" have become Pym trademarks. "While this is not Pym at her sophisticated best, it marked an auspicious debut - and thus is an ironic post mortem for a writer no longer obscure" (Bannon, 1983b:55-56).1
Booklist finds the novel "thoroughly Pymesque", "exquisitely charming", and comments on the novel's circumscribed world (Hooper, 1983:1166).
As has been noted earlier, none of Barbara Pym's novels appeared in America before 1977, and several of the early novels were issued there for . __ / the first time after her death in 1980 - hence this somewhat chronologi
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 29
The New Yorker paraphrases, but does not characterise, and concedes that
Barbara Pym is different ("only a Barbara Pym heroine could think such
thoughts, as readers of her nine other novels have come to appreciate"
(Anon., J983d:J 12).
Mary Ellen Quinn (1983:1383) observes that the novel's interest lies in Pym's close observation of her characters and their ordinary lives, while Pamela Marsh (1983:B9/l) uses adjectives like "shrewd", "mocking", "affectionate", "quiet", and
'
"witty" to describe Pym's depiction of the "Jane Austen-like" lives of her characters. The novel reiterates one of Pym's favourite themes, that of un-requited love which has nothing to do with sex, and which flourishes only when it is hope less.
The critical consensus regarding Pym's first novel therefore seems to be that it is a restrained, deft, witty depiction of the unremarkable lives of unremarkable
characters -"slightly dotty", the New Yorker admits. It is reminiscent of Jane
Austen because of its narrow confines, but more importantly because of the growing self-awareness and recognition which come to its protagonists.
2.6.2 Excellent Women
Of Excellent Women, first published In 1952, Barbara Bannon (1978a:80) comments: "· •• an early novel from a fine writer . • . Pym's singular world is a lonely, bittersweet familiar place. She travels it with rueful wit, views the human landscape with a wise, sharp, compassionate eye." The solitary ones are
30 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey or Criticism: Barbara Pym
the observers of life, rather than the protagonists, but their very solitude is comforting.
Booklist comments that Pym's novels deserve wide attention from American readers. Of Excellent Women: "There is an old-fashioned manner to Pym's writing that is neither quaint nor stuffy. With understated passion, she com-prehends the wrestlings of desire and emotion within individuals" (Anon., 1978a:355).
Polly Brodie is less lenient, preferring the infinitely more sombre Quartet in Autumn, which she terms "an impressive novel". Although Mildred's emotional awakening is drawn with insight, "the other characters are colorless, and the gray uneventfulness of the life portrayed infects the style" (Brodie, 1978:213 5).
lsa Kapp (1983) finds Excellent Women Pym's most benign novel, a "compound of marinating self-deprecation and salty accuracy . . . to counteract her mild manners" (1983:237). She indicates that Pym's wane in fo1·tunes during the 'sixties was due to het admirable restraint: "Barbara Pym is not much attracted to chaos, whether linguistic or emotional, and nurtures instead an implausible fascination for everything that is orderly and habitual" (1983:237). Kapp also points out that women like Mildred (the "excellent women" of the title) are dignified anachronisms, and therefore almost unimaginable in America. However, " ••• the real upshot of the matter is that Barbara Pym sees woman's place from a very strange perspective: to her, this is really a woman's world, and men are the weaker sex" (Kapp, 1983:238). The radius in which these charac-ters move is startlingly narrow, and there is more not happening in them than actually happening.
EXCELLENT WOMEN 31 A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
Rosalind Wade (1978:46) intimates that a study of Pym's novels underlines the insidious and catastrophic change in social conditions in England; at the same time Excellent Women emerges as one of the most brilliant comedy novels of the century.
John Updike, not unexpectedly, is less amused. Pym's world is "wanly Christian" (1979:116); like Kapp, he comments on the almost total absence of action. "It would be hard to imagine a more timid world than that of 'Excellent Women,' or a novel wherein closer to nothing happens" (1979: 117). He too remarks upon the resemblance to Jane Austen: "Miss Pym has been compared to Jane Austen, yet there is a virile country health in the Austen novels, and some vivid marital prospects for her blooming heroines" (1979:117). An unfair jibe, surely, as most of Pym's heroines are paired off as surely as are Jane Austen's, and with the same nagging doubt as the reader is often left with in Austen's novels. As Jane, Margaret Drabble's heroine In The Waterfall, remarks:
How I dislike Jane Austen. How deeply I deplore her desperate wit. Her moral tone dismays me: my heart goes out to the vulgarity of those little card parties that Mrs Philips gave at Meryton, to that squalid rowdy hole at Portsmouth where Fanny Price used to live, to Lydia at fifteen gaily flashing her wedding ring through the carriage window, to Frank Churchill, above all to Frank Churchill, lying and deceiving and proffering embarrassing extravagant gifts. Emma got what she deserved, in marrying Mr Knlghtley. What can it have been like, in bed with Mr Knightley? Sorrow awaited that woman: she would have done better to steal Frank Churchill, if she could (Drabble, 1980:57-58).
32 EXCEJ,LENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
However, "Mildred Lathbury is one of the last . . . of the great narrating English virgins, and though she tells us she is 'not at all like Jane Eyre,' her tale has some of the power of, say, the portion of 'Bleak House' narrated by Esther Summerson - the power, that Is, of virtue, with its artistic complement of perfect moral pitch and crystalline discriminations" (Updike, 1979:118).
Given Updike's own novels, it is not surprising that he should conclude by noting that Barbara Pym offers us characters with strikingly modest sex drives, and "'Excellent Women,' arriving on these shores in a heyday of sexual hype, is a startling reminder that solitude may be chosen, and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue, feminine patience" (1979:119). Although Barbara Pym enthused about "super American reviews • • • including a long one . • • from John Updike" (Pym, 1984d:324), Updike's review is curiously uneven, concluding as it does with this trite piece of doggerel:
Pym and Lem, 1 Lem and Pym -There's little love In her or him. Out on a limb With Pym and Lem One hugs oneself Instead of them.
A.L. Rowse reiterates the contention of Updike, that the excesses of the 'sixties have made the saturated reader of contemporary fiction appreciate the subtleties
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer of a thriller, The Chain of Chance, reviewed by Updike in the same article.
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 33
and finesse of Barbara Pym, and his assessment of Pym is sufficiently important to be quoted at length:
"That is one of the advantages of a subtle writer where everything is toned down as against the appalling crudity and obviousness, the outrageous barrage (with its law of diminishing returns) of so much contemporary literature, if literature it can be called, as Miss Pym would say.
"The Kitchen Sink School, the squalor of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the brash climb up to Room at the Top, the trash-bins in which Samuel Beckett's people end their Happy Days; the alcoholism and drugs, the murders and incest, of the Butcher's Shop School; the obsessive tedium of a Henry Miller.
"Does it never strike these writers that exaggeration, piling it on - always trying to go one worse - has a diminishing effect aesthetically, one simply ceases to react or care?
"Whereas the piano effects of Miss Pym's crisp comedy register; one cares for her characters and what happens to them, they are so real and truthfully rendered. Her books are a distillation of life; and if in water-colour, well, what better than the best English water-colours?" (Rowse, 1977:732).
Anne Duchene postulates that of all Pym's works, Excellent Women is still the most felicitous (1977:1096), and concedes that Miss Pym has always been an expert in loneliness and in High Anglican Comedy (whatever that might entail). Irony enriches her novels.
34 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
As cited in the introduction to this study, Lord David Cecil considered Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings "the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared .in England during the past 75 years"; however, Victoria Glendinning (1978:8) argues that the mildness of Excellent Women prevents It from being "high comedy". Glendinning finds Mildred (the "excellent woman") an anomaly; she is at once dim yet also observant and critical. The irony in the novel "is not the steel jab of feminism, merely a mild, fine irony toward the ways of the world" (Glendinning, 1978:8). Glendinning also finds the later Quartet in Autumn a finer book, but acknowledges that it is in the ironic exploration of "the experience of not having" that Pym's art and originality lie. Although Philip Larkin has pointed out that Pym's men are grotesquely insensi -tive, stingy and selfish (1977:260), her heroines possibly lack the gutsy raunchi-ness associated with much current feminist writing.
Karl Miller (1978:24) points out that Mildred, initially faltering and fragile, evolves as shrewd, cool, self-possessed and stylish. The parallel with Jane Austen is also analysed in considerable detail:
"Women like Mildred have been important to the England which has insulted them, which calls them, using the words that Lawrence used of Jane Austen, 'narrow-gutted spinsters."'
Miller points out that Pym's novels (notably Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn) could be thought to have originated in themes and initiatives of two hundred years ago, when an interest in victims arose. What is meant by the frequent comparisons with Jane Austen is that Pym is a novelist of manners
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 35
"who writes about marriage and marriageability with the unromantic eye of a noticing, 'positive' spinster" (Miller, 1978:24). He continues:
"There is a current reading of Jane Austen which holds that she is moved by the romantic attitudes with which she finds fault, and of Miss Pym, too, it can be claimed that she is both unromantic and romantic" (Miller, 1978:24).
Miller likens Excellent Women to Mansfield Park: like Fanny who is exposed to the blandishments of the Crawfords, but is justly rewarded in marriage and material goods, so Mildred, initially beguiled by the glamorous but feckless Napiers, eventually too gets her man. The novel also warrants comparison with the Gothic novels of the Brontes:
"At the same time, there is more than a touch of the Gothic novel in Excellent Women: the grand names conferred on Everard and on Rockingham Napier suggest the Cavalier strain which is evident there, the heroine's faltering and venturing are Gothic acts and words; and Everard is the hostile male of the genre who grows into her lover and savior. He is Mildred's Rochester, just as the pseudo-orphan Allegra Gray is her vampire" (Miller, 1978:24).
Lotus Snow, in an article entitled "The Trivial Round, the Common Task: Barbara Pym's Novels", concentrates on the minutiae which comprise Pym's world, and which assume monumental stature. Mildred is one of Pym's many "excellent women"; Pym's men are largely characters for women's unrequited love. They consist of clergymen, anthropologists, dandies, and homosexuals.
36 EXCELLENT WOMEN
A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
"Like her anthropologists, whom she gently mocks for their nimbus of esoteric detachment, Miss Pym scrupulously notes and records the behavior of 'ordinary people, people who have no claim to fame whatsoever.' . • . [She] distances her
characters • . • but treats them with a warm compassion and an irony that is always gentle .•• A specialist in loneliness, Miss Pym chronicles with poignant comedy the drama of minutiae: 'the trivial round, the common task"' (Snow,
1980:92).
The diverse reviews of Excellent Women focus on character - that of the "excellent women" and their undeserving men, leavened by Pym's muted but sure ironic touch. Kapp (1983:240) warns that although Pym does write mainly about spinsters of both sexes ·who are timid, reserved and unenterprising, she is never trivial, never lacking in suspense. She extends the omnipresent Austen com-parison:
"Much more than a comedy of manners, it is a drama of disposition, willpower, and ethics, a closer relation of E.M. Forster and Henry James than of those busier and giddier novelists with whom this writer is usually linked: Angela Thirkell, Anthony Powell, and Iris Murdoch. Miss Pym does not sermonize us in quite the way that Jane Austen did" (Kapp, 1983:240).
According to Barbara Brothers, Pym's art is subversive, as her gentle ironies mock the romantic paradigm. Hers is not the pen of the satirist, for it is too compassionate (1984:79).
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A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 37
2.6.3. Jane and Prodence
There are relatively few reviews of Pym's third novel, Jane and Prudence, other than criticism contained in the more comprehensive articles discussed earlier. The shorter reviews all coincide with the release of the novel in the United States. Barbara Bannon of Publishers Weekly (1981b:59) calls it "a gentle, folksy story where attention is focused on the manners and morals of a quiet English country town". There are no "vigorous characters or lively plot", and Jane's matchmaking attempts provide the only mild surprise in the novel. No grist to the mill of the feminists here either, for "we can be amused by the quaint, unliberated ideas of Pym's women about themselves and the menfolk they rather patronizingly try to manage" (Bannon, 198lb:59). Bannon appears to ignore the fact that Jane and Prudence was first published In the early 'fifties, long before the more strident of the feminists got under way.
D.P Donavin (1981b:l79) attempts a paraphrase, nearly always impossible in the ease of a Pym novel, and concedes that this Is a beguiling novel which will enchant A meriean readers. "Pym's appealing characters carry this modest plot beautifully, with charm and wit" (Donavin, 198lb: 179).
Judith Sutton (1981:2154) calls the novel one of Pym's most delightful, for "Pym's understated sense of humor is particularly in evidence here and her readers will find themselves charmed and amused".
Pym makes Jane more than merely a clown in this very funny novel; she gives her a sense of humour and makes her a heroine (Anon., 198le:l88).
38 EXCELLENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
The most perceptive piece of criticism comes from Anatole Broyard (1982:27). Jane is a typical example of what he calls The Woman Who Overflows Her Situation (his capitals). "This woman, this archetype, this unsung heroine of the ordinary life, is always reaching for a further reference, always trying, in E.M. Forster's sense, to connect the low and the high, the near and the far, the everyday and the eternal."
Jane, with her confounding quotations, is somewhat like a searchlight, rather than the dim halo which a proper vicar's wife should be. In this novel, too, the diminished stature of men is a recurrent theme. Pym treats .her male characters with affection, although she sees them as being blinded by com-placency. Broyard elegantly epitomises the essence of Pym's irony in his con-eluding comments:
"To call Jane a fine example of Miss Pym's irony is not enough, because every serious writer, good or bad, is ironical these days. What is so pleasing about Miss Pym's irony is the fact that, like Miss Doggett's clothes, it is specially fitted; it is exactly Jane's shape and nobody else's. It is cozy and opposed to cosmic irony, warm, not cold, sweet rather than bitter. lt is not a grandiose defeat but an incorrigible enthusiasm running through life like a dog chasing a bird." 1
In her overview of the novels, Lotus Snow comments on the intelligent heroine, as typified by Jane, as well as the "less excellent women"; women more desir-ous of being loved than they are capable of loving (Snow, 1980:83-87). The
EXCELLENT WOMEN
A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym 39
excessively handsome Fabian Driver falls into what Snow terms the category of the dandies; the dandies in Pym's novels do not fall in love with excellent women. In the case of Fabian Driver, Miss Morrow, who eventually stoops to low cunning to ensnure him, is too sharp to fall into this latter category.
Jane and Prudence, therefore, becomes a vehicle, albeit a deft and light one, for Pym's views on men, and what are commonly perceived as "men's needs". This too is stressed by Brothers (1984:62).
!sa Kapp notes that Jane is not a typical Pym heroine, "having been saved by marriage from too much tidiness and self-absorption, and by poetry from parochialism" (1983:238). The novel Is "full of natural hilarity, toned up with that singularly British resistance to dolors and depressions" (Kapp, 1983:238).
Both Brothers and Kapp remark on how women's romantic notions are formed by literature. Jane, with her often wildly Inappropriate quotations from the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, and her romantic notions about living In a country parish borrowed from Trollope's novels, is possibly one of Pym's most vital and engaging heroines.
Jane and Prudence is a different novel about the sexes, not so much about the excellent women with no great expectations of romantic love, but about those who discover that their princes are frogs after all.
40
2.6.4. Less than Angels
EXCEl.LENT WOMEN A Survey of Criticism: Barbara Pym
Pym's next novel, Less than Angels, has as its milieu the academic world of the anthropologists - the world in which Barbara Pym spent the greater part of her professional working life.
Barbara Bannon calls Pym's novels "lapidary reconstructions [a felicitous phrase] of English middle-class life". Pym is "top-drawer" in this novel, in which "a gaggle of anthropologists are observed in their natural habitat, a London research center where their idiosyncratic tribal rites of mating and manipulating provoke amusement and wonder. The spokespersons for Pym's wry evaluations of spinsters and bachelors - Catherine Oliphant, a writer, and her housemate, pothering anthropologist, Tom Mallow -are strangely real" (Bannon, 1980b:43).
W.B. Hooper says that the novel is not Pym's best, yet "with typically shrewd satire, an intricate plot, and characters so apparently ordinary that their very ordinariness is attractive, Pym depicts the amorous adventures of a circle of acquaintances - anthropologists, for the most part - that includes spinsters, private eccentrics, and young men and women in need of pairing up. l.ess than Angels is in no way dated; its continued freshness is to be marvelled at" (1981:615).
In a more perspicacious review, David Kubal (1981:462-463) emphasises, as other critics have done, the innate ability of Pym's women to cope, thus making them infinitely superior to the weaker race of men.
